Kyle Wilhoit

Our new intelligence on BlackEnergy expands previous findings on the first wide-scale coordinated attack against industrial networks. Based on our research that we will further outline below, attackers behind the outages in two power facilities in Ukraine in December likely attempted similar attacks against a mining company and a large railway operator in Ukraine.

Whenever people think of APTs and targeted attacks, people ask: who did it? What did they want? While those questions may well be of some interest, we think it is much more important to ask: what information about the attacker can help organizations protect themselves better?

Let’s look at things from the perspective of a network administrator trying to defend their organization. If someone wants to determine who was behind an attack on their organization, maybe the first thing they’ll do use IP address locations to try and determine the location of an attacker. However, say an attack was traced to a web server in Korea. What’s not to say that whoever was responsible for the attack also compromised that server? What makes you think that site’s owner will cooperate with your investigation?

With analysis and research by Stephen Hilt (Independent Researcher) Even as attacks on SCADA devices has become more public, devices are constantly being reported as Internet-facing and thus, vulnerable to attacks. Very little security is implemented on these devices, making them perfect targets of opportunity. Recently, Internet-facing gas station pumps have gained some attention, when…

PoS malware has been receiving a tremendous amount of attention in the past two years with high profile incidents like Target, Home Depot, and Kmart. With the massive “Black Friday” shopping season coming up, PoS malware will surely get additional publicity. This high profile nature means, we constantly look for evolving PoS malware and look into their behavior…

One of our 2014 security predictions is that cyber criminals will more frequently leverage targeted attack methodologies. Some of these tactics include using spear phishing attacks, as well as well-known vulnerabilities that have been used successfully in targeted attacks. Let’s see why cybercriminals are taking a closer look at these techniques, and how this can…